


(Here) Under Burning Skies

by clunion68



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Comfort, Death, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Fun!, Late at Night, Momtara, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, Nightmares, POV Katara (Avatar), Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, Storms, Trauma, Ugh, a wee bit of dadko at the end as a treat, bby kya is afraid of lightning, bone app the teeth dear readers, but anyway, i'll throw in a couple warnings here, it's not always happily ever after but they sure are trying their best, like she struggles and she still hurts but she's like nothing but love for my kids thanks, more than i planned, she just really loves so hard it hurts sometimes huh, she really just loves her daughter so much all her children so much it makes me want to cry, she's such a good mom, y'all this one is a bit angsty, yeah those are the big ones here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:54:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26770984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clunion68/pseuds/clunion68
Summary: Some nagging voice whispered cruel blame into Katara’s ears. It told her what she already knew. Look into her eyes and see her father. Look into her eyes and tell yourself exactly what her gift will be. Does she, somewhere in her bones, in the blood that you have given her, see her father falling and coursing with electricity he cannot quite steer away from his heart? Does she, somewhere in her bones, in the blood that very same man has given her, feel a blistering power forming, a power she cannot understand and is that what frightens her, makes her weep? She realized the voice was her own and it made her chest burn in the very spot where her husband had been scarred by the very thing her child had somehow grown to fear._____Kya fears lightning. Since when? Doesn't matter now, she does. Katara did once too. Still has nightmares about it. She holds her daughter close in a raging night telling her it's all okay, that they are all still here and that they are still okay, and, if she's honest, sometimes she's repeating those words just as much for herself.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 59





	(Here) Under Burning Skies

**Author's Note:**

> CW: death, major anxiety/ panic attacks 
> 
> (Also I suggest reading this with some thunderstorm sounds in the background, just for a little theatricality, why not?)

_Red. Red. The sky was red and white light kept flashing across her eyes. White light kept flashing and she couldn’t tell if it was a memory forming in minutes passed or tears striking, blurring her vision. The water on her hands, on his chest, was cold or maybe it was warm. Maybe everything was warm under the heat of the comet and trickling of the hourglass._

_A woman in blue stands under the red sky. A woman in blue with eyes like her daughter’s stands under a red sky and stares. She holds out a hand and beckons. She beckons both for the girl and the boy she cannot seem to revive._

_Her daughter stares back with blue flame eyes and they burn and burn and burn and she cannot channel the damage out from his heart but she dares not reach towards her mother._

_“Katara…”_

_The voice belongs to the woman in blue, to the dying prince, to her own mind and they speak in unison._

_The woman, her mother, her mother who looks like she herself does, kneels and cradles his head. He shuts his eyes. His chest goes cold. The water is warm. No. It is burning. It is burning. And the sky is red. It is burning. She falls to his chest and cries._

_The sky is red. Red and burning. Somewhere close behind a chained girl screams. The water on her hands, her hands wrapped around him, turns to blood._

_Her mother sings as she runs her fingers through her hair._

_____

“Mommy…”

It wasn’t the rain throwing itself against the windows and it wasn’t the thunder battering the walls. It was a little whimper from about a foot away that woke her from her nightmare.

Katara blinked the crust out of her eyes and propped herself up. She felt her body in bed and waited for her heart to return from that burning courtyard. She waited for it to look around in the night and recognize the man sleeping beside her, breathing softly beside her. She waited for it to find their daughter, proof more than anything of reality, tears running down her cheeks like rain through a gutter. It wasn’t that she wanted to see her daughter crying at her bedside in the middle of the night, but she would be lying if she said she wasn’t relieved to be awake.

_She’s hurt. She’s ill. She’s also having bad dreams. She’s had such bad dreams she’s made herself ill and somehow hurt herself in the process –_

“What’s going on? Are you sick? Does something hurt?”

Katara swung her legs over the side of the bed and reached over to feel her daughter’s forehead.

“I’m not sick!”

She didn’t feel sick. That was good.

“Sweetie, how long have you been standing here?”

“I don’t know…”

_Oh you really are your father’s daughter, aren’t you? Every day more and more._

She would have stood there until the sun rose or until she collapsed in a heap on the floor. Whichever came first.

The room lit up blue, her husband snored, her daughter let out a cry, and Katara wrangled her heart back from the courtyard and the red sky.

“I’m scared!”

As her daughter crashed into her arms and crumpled, she felt she could probably move the storm out of the sky. She could tell her daughter to wait, lie in her bed as she threw back the curtains and doors, stood drenched on the balcony in the rain, and used all her strength to disintegrate the clouds. She could stand out in the lightning’s path and though she could not redirect it like her husband, she could rip apart the very fabric of the storm and send it falling in one swift motion back towards the land and sea. Yes, she felt she could do this, fueled by the searing pain in her daughter’s eyes and her own memories alone she could do this.

But she looked back at those eyes. Kya had come into the world like most children, crying. Shrieks that pierced Katara’s heart, reminiscent of the sobs of a chained and broken girl, who at her wits’ end tried to burn the pain out of her throat as she strained against her defeat and her shattered destiny. She was only taking her first breaths and yet her little heart seemed to pour forth more than a decade’s worth of pain entirely unknown to her.

And then she opened her eyes. Then she opened her eyes and they blazed gold as the rising sun. She opened her eyes to her new world and found her mother, worn and glazed with pain and sweat, but smiling, smiling wide as the sea greeting the horizon. The moment she met her mother face to face, met the woman who had nurtured and sustained her, grown her and brought her forth into the world, she stopped. She ceased her cries and, as much as she could, smiled too.

A phantom hand lingered on the back of Katara’s head and a gentle splinter of a voice pressed into her mind. She would find a way to bend all of nature to her whim for her daughter, for all of her children, but tonight she would simply hold her.

Katara patted the bed next to her.

“Come on.”

By the time the next flash had come and gone, her child had leaped over her, making sure to anchor her hands directly into some of her most vital organs as she scrambled to her side. A little temporary pain would subside and Katara kept one arm securing her daughter and the other combing through her hair.

“Oh Kya, Kya, Kya.”

Kya held on to her mother for dear life. She squeezed tighter as the thunder threatened the roof and walls. She squeezed tighter as she felt that sooner or later the wrath of the sky would split open the earth, and if they were going to be swallowed she would at least fall in her mother’s arms.

“It’s okay. I’m here.”

In four and a half years Kya had never really woken them up in the night for anything. Rarely had she disturbed them as a baby (though once the sun had risen she would feel the need to announce to her parents, possibly the whole palace, possibly even the entire Fire Nation if not the world, the dawn of a glorious new day in the only way that a baby could). And occasionally she would come in and tap her mother on the shoulder or tug at her sleeves to announce in a timid voice that she felt feverish or funny, or, to everyone’s chagrin, that she had already thrown up in some horribly inconvenient location.

But she had never woken them up about nightmares, even though she must have had them. She had never come running with tales of monsters under the bed or evil spirits rustling through her curtains. But something about the storm was different. As a daughter of the Fire Nation, she was no stranger to storms. A lightning storm to a Fire Nation summer was as unremarkable as a blizzard to a South Pole winter. Kids, Katara reminded herself, changed on a whim. And plenty of children, she wagered, were afraid of storms. Even Fire Nation children. Even Fire Nation Princesses.

_I’ll show you lightning!_

Katara let the shiver run down her spine and planted a kiss on her daughter’s head as she pictured her lying awake and alone in her room as her mind began to tell her she was in danger. She pictured her pulling herself under her covers but caught spiraling in a riptide of her own fear. She pictured her running from her bed and all the way down the caverned halls her little voice breaking and her bare feet pitter-pattering with the rain. Even Katara had to admit the palace halls in the dead of night were a bit creepy. She had spent enough restless nights wandering trying to find solace in the soles of her feet and the stars in the sky. But alone in the dark, the ceilings were always a little too high, and it was all too easy to picture the ghosts that must have been trapped up there in the cobwebs.

“Look at you, my brave girl, coming all the way to me by yourself in this big storm. You are my brave, brave Kya.”

“I am?”

“As any warrior.”

_A week ago it was bravery and now it’s stupid?_

_Yes! Reckless and stupid! Do you have ANY idea what you could have lost, besides, oh, I don’t know, your damn life?_

_Yeah! I did! I do! I thought it was pretty fucking obvious!_

_I can’t sleep Zuko. I close my eyes and I watch you die! I close my eyes and I watch you die, and I just think how many people I lo – how many people do I have to watch die?!_

_But Katara, I’m here. I’m here, you –_

_I’m sorry I yelled. I – I’ll close the curtains, you should get some rest._

Another bolt of lightning hurled itself across the sky cracking like a dish thrown against the kitchen floor.

It made her daughter shutter. It made her shutter like she’d been hit.

“It’s gonna come through the window. It’s gonna get me.”

“It can’t get you inside. You’re safe inside.”

“No Mommy it comes through the window!”

“Hmm,” she curled a lock of Kya’s hair behind her ear, “okay. When Daddy makes fire, it makes light, right? Lightning is the sky, like Daddy, making super quick fire, what comes through our windows is just its light.”

Some nagging voice whispered cruel blame into Katara’s ears. It told her what she already knew. Look into her eyes and see her father. Look into her eyes and tell yourself exactly what her gift will be. Does she, somewhere in her bones, in the blood that you have given her, see her father falling and coursing with electricity he cannot quite steer away from his heart? Does she, somewhere in her bones, in the blood that very same man has given her, feel a blistering power forming, a power she cannot understand, and is that what frightens her, makes her weep? She realized the voice was her own and it made her chest burn in the very spot where her husband had been scarred by the very thing her child had somehow grown to fear.

_Why does Daddy have a funny thing on his belly? Where’s mine?_

_Well, honey, Daddy wasn’t born that way. He got it saving Mommy._

_Oh. That was nice of him. From what?_

The rain fell like daggers and when lightning struck again, her daughter shut her eyes and waited for the thunder. She shut her eyes and curled her fists and tried to live up to being the brave girl her mother told her she already was.

When lightning struck again, Katara had found herself staring at her sleeping husband, his back turned towards her, watching him light up, watching his hair dripping like vines gleam, squinting her eyes til they stung to catch the rise and fall of his breath, timing the seconds in between his inhalations and exhalations, timing the seconds in between the lightning and the thunder, waiting for him to shift or stir ever so slightly so that the images still floating in her head could wither like a drenched and dying moth.

When the thunder came, it sounded like laughter.

 _It hits me sometimes. I can’t control it. It’s like I’m right there all over again, and all I see is you – all I see is – and then I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s like I have to see you. I have to see you before I can do anything else again. I have to see you and I have to hear your voice. And I have to feel you. And I have to know that you’re –_

_Katara –_

_I know. I know. I know. You’re busy and I barged in here. And I must sound crazy. I’m sorry. I know. I just needed to – I have to get back to work too so. Look, I know you’re alive and that you’re fine. I mean, intellectually. But I can’t explain it. It just hits and I need to know you’re not –_

_– I understand._

_– Dead._

“Mommy?”

“Kya?”

“I’m really sorry.”

“For?”

“I made you wake up.”

_Believe me kid; I wasn’t having a great time being asleep._

How lovely to be a child and to think the cruelest thing in the world was to wake her mother in the middle of the night. How bittersweet to be a child who thought for an instant her own mother would be upset to have to take care of her. How it broke Katara’s heart that, she should be so lucky, the only thing she would have to sacrifice as a mother would be her sleep.

“Sweetie, whenever you need me, I’m here. That’s what mommies are for.”

Katara kissed the forehead of the girl who bore her mother's name and gently ran her fingers through her hair. That was what mothers were for.

That’s what she remembered mothers being for. Her father’s hands had felt different running through her hair, braiding her hair. Her father’s hands had felt like her whole world because they had become her whole world, and they felt like home just as much as her mother’s hands had. But they were not her mother’s hands. And one day they too were gone. Every passing year Katara grasped harder at the memory of her mother’s hands and every passing year they pulled further and further away. Once very long ago she could feel them sloping down her scalp still, once very long ago they lingered there. But the world kept turning and her hands kept moving down and away and once they’d brushed her hair all the way out, they wouldn’t be coming back up.

She had spoken aloud, or maybe prayed, to her mother once the night before the arrival of Sozin’s Comet, once the night before her wedding, and once just before Lu Ten was born. She hadn’t made a habit of calling upon her mother’s spirit; it felt like talking to dead air and probably was. But if there was even the slightest chance she was listening, she had to take it. Whether her mother was there or not, she was still scared and she still needed her.

She needed her to hear, as motherhood had become as difficult to ignore as her aching back and swollen feet, that she felt like she already knew all too well what it was to be a mother and would grow sick of it. What she had learned of motherhood was to clean everyone’s mess, to cook everyone’s meals, to dry everyone’s tears if they ever wanted to shed them, and to put herself aside over and over and over until she looked at her reflection and couldn’t tell if she was still a child, if she was ever a child. By the war’s end, she had been the child mother to children who by the war’s end also knew not what childhood was supposed to mean. She feared, as she cried out to her mother, that she would look into the eyes of her children and mourn her youth. Or that she would grow frightened of them, these children who would no doubt carry fragments of her – fragments of not just her body but her soul, her memories, her deepest fears, and the anger that still sat deep in her belly like smoldering coal.

Because she would always, no matter how hard she tried, be angry at the universe for leaving her to look for her mother’s eyes in the stars. She would always be angry for feeling guilt like a waterskin around her waist that she was only alive because her mother was dead. And when she looked into the faces of her children and saw fragments of him staring back, she felt the weight swell and crash. On the one hand, He had saved her and she had saved him in return. Simple. What was done was done. They all lived happily ever after most days. On the other hand, she still sometimes saw the world going blue and then white and she saw him fall and she froze and felt like she was too late. She saw yet another person willing to end their world so that she may continue to walk freely in hers. Not that she would ever truly be free. It was as though the more her mother’s hands slipped away, the tighter she needed to grab on to those of her husband. The tighter she needed to hold fast to her children who wouldn’t realize until they were far, far older that sometimes she had needed them as much as they had needed her.

“You know, there weren’t really any storms where Mommy grew up.”

“So you were scared of lightning too?”

“At one point. Yeah, I was.”

_I didn’t make it in time._

_It was only a dream._

_I didn’t make it. I couldn’t –_

_You’re right here with me._

_I don’t know what I’d do if –_

_I’m right here. It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere._

_Okay. Okay._

_Face it Katara, you’re kinda stuck with me._

The storm was dying. The roll of thunder was growing lazier by the minute dragging itself reluctantly, trudging half-heartedly after lightning that seemed to grow dim and tired with distance. Still, the rain kept tapping on windows and running down the roof into the gutters like it couldn’t fall fast enough like its only desire was to kiss the trees and rooftops and earth. And still, her husband snored, and still, her daughter sniffled, and still, she drew her close to her side and swept her fingers through her hair like currents.

“What did your mommy do when you got scared?”

“Well, she would also snuggle me close and run her fingers through my hair, and she would sing to me, or tell me stories, and sometimes we would just sit together and that was enough.”

“Grandpa says she was pretty.”

“She was beautiful.”

“Grandpa says that I’m pretty too.”

“He’s right. You are. You are very pretty. My gorgeous girl.”

“I don’t want to be pretty.”

“Oh. Okay. Uh…” _Pick your battles Katara, pick your battles, “_ You can be whatever you’d like to be.”

That made her smile and Katara could only imagine what it was her daughter actually wanted to be.

“Can you tell me a story?”

Dull lightning flashed shedding light through the room in a shallow wave. Kya barely flinched.

“Of course.”

And maybe it was the rain throwing itself against the windows, or the thunder pressing on the walls, or the hushed conversation that finally stirred him. At this point in his life the man could sleep through an invasion. But considering his position it was best if perhaps he didn’t.

He blinked and turned his head over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow at the little visitor.

“Is everything –?”

“It’s all fine.”

He turned around propping himself up, one hand on the bed beneath him the other cradling a small flame.

“Is she - ?”

Katara shook her head and mouthed _lightning_.

Zuko gave a nod in return and mouthed _Oh_.

“I was actually just about to tell Kya a story.”

Kya turned her head back to her father and smiled as warmly as the flickering light.

“You can listen too if you want.”

“Oh good,” he cut out the flame and nestled closer, Katara could see the scar on her husband’s chest, “thank you. I’d really hate to miss out on a story.”

Before curling up he, his majesty also eagerly awaiting a story perhaps more so than the actual child in question, leaned over and planted a quick kiss on their daughter’s forehead.

Surprised wasn’t the right way to put it. It had been far too long for her to be surprised by how sweet Zuko had become. But sometimes when she’d see him be so affectionate – throw his arm around Lu Ten just to say hello, scoop Rohan and Izumi into a hug or a piggyback ride, kiss Kya so tenderly on her forehead like he just now had – her mind fell back towards the boy he once was: the crown prince of reticence, afraid to get too close for fear that love too would burn. He’d spend his whole life catching up on that sweetness that had long ago been suffocated in burning flesh and smoke. He would spend his whole life catching up and Katara did not mind one bit.

“Everyone comfy? Everyone ready?”

They both looked up at her with wide golden eyes and nodded.

“Alright. Once upon a time –“

“Wait, Mommy.”

“Yes?”

“No kissing stories please.”

“Okay. You got it.”

In the waning hours of the night’s tempest, Katara knew the story she would tell. There would be no kissing in it, as promised. But the story she would tell was a love story. It would be mostly the truth, with some changes to names and places. It would be truer than the version she saw every so often in her nightmares. It would be true enough that later on, when her daughter was ready to hear why exactly her father had a scar on his chest and she didn’t, what exactly he saved her mother from except, as they had told her, getting very badly hurt by someone who was herself hurting, she might recognize it as one of her mother’s tales or not. She would tell a version of it, it would be a love story, and there would be no kissing.

“Once upon a time, there was a kingdom on the sea. In the kingdom, there was a girl who had traveled very far from her home of ice and snow. And in the kingdom, there was also, of course, a very grumpy prince.”

“Hey.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, he can’t be a handsome prince or something?”

“Sssh! Daddy!”

“Sorry. Proceed.”

“Once upon a time in a kingdom on the sea lived a girl who had traveled very far from her home of ice and snow a very grumpy,” her husband pouted behind their daughter’s back, _oh fine_ , “very _handsome_ prince.”

The world outside grew quieter and quieter and Katara moved through the story like a river coursing from the mountains to the shore. She kept her fingers winding through her daughter’s hair and kept watch of her stubborn eyes straining under the weight of her exhaustion. She was a fighter alright, and she was fighting to keep her eyes open, fighting to listen to her mother’s story, fighting to catch the details of how the grumpy (yes, _and handsome_ ) prince betrayed the girl, how he found his way back to her, how he fought to help her, how they became friends, how they would have to fight together to save the kingdom. She was valiant; Kya fought til the bitter end but lost the battle to the small hours of the night and her mother’s arms.

In the morning she would wake, crawl back over her mother, and out the door. She would scurry down the hall to greet the day, greet her siblings with open arms a grin. She would leave the night’s fear behind like a puddle turned to gold in the morning light. She would scold the tea that she never had the patience to let cool, she would stuff her cheeks with hotcakes and figs, giggling at her older brother’s jokes and trying, taking great pride in being an older sister now herself, to get her baby brother and sister to laugh with silly sounds and funny faces. Her eyes would shine and everything that had made her cry from before would fade like a bad dream. And her mother’s hands in her hair would be nothing more than a phantom touch.

“So,” her husband whispered through a knowing smile, “does she save the prince in the end?”

She laced her hand into his. She knew the scar was right underneath the covers. She could feel the heat and dust settling in that burning courtyard, underneath that red sky. She could feel the curse under her breath, the tears refusing to fall until she had an answer: dead or alive. She could feel her hands extracting and pleading, and she recalled that it would be a very different world the next time she placed her hands so openly on his chest. She felt him dying, she felt him slipping, she felt him fighting it all the same. Still somehow fighting alongside her. And at the time, when she was so much younger and everything that had torn her apart was still trying to lodge itself in her flesh, she didn’t know she loved him. Not like that. And she supposed he didn’t know he loved her. Not like that. But there was little else it could have been.

She squeezed his hand tighter.

_I’m here. I’m here. I’m here._

She squeezed his hand tighter and felt him live. She felt his heart clear and beating. She saw his eyes hardly flutter open. Everything seemed to burn under the trail of the comet, and her tears were no exception. He was alive. Barely able to stand, victorious but watching his home ablaze and his sister rage and collapse like the dying of a storm, worn and with the future of his nation now weighed in his hands, he was not well, but he was alive. Alive. The hand she kept on his back steadied him. The hand she kept on his back steadied her too. The longer she could feel him breathing, the firmer she could plant her feet on the ground. She could feel him breathing and each breath pulled her back into her body. She was standing next to him. They were alive. She was beside him instead of still frozen to the spot where she had seen the end, and seen her mother’s eyes in a flash beckoning her home. She was standing beside the boy who had fallen in her place and helping him rise.

_I know. I know. I know._

“Yes,” she looked at their daughter, prayed she dreamt of something good, and she looked at her husband, “in the end, she did.”

**Author's Note:**

> Boy howdy that one was a roller coaster! I started off writing this like aw we'll do another cute 'it's the middle of the night and one of the kids can't sleep but now it's Katara and Kya aaaaaaaw', and it turned into 'maybe she's born with it, maybe it's generational trauma'. Ah well, it still ends on a sweet note, right? (Gotta have a little Dadko in there, I'm such a gosh darn sucker) 
> 
> I actually really wrestled with this one, I find I have a much harder time writing from Katara's perspective than from Zuko's. Go figure ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ But either way, I'm glad I didn't get frustrated and call it quits since I really wanted to write from Katara's POV! The power of perseverance! Never give up without a fight! Some other third thing!
> 
> Not so much else to say, just hope you enjoyed it/got something out of it. Shoutout to anyone else who as a kid was S U P E R scared of thunderstorms. Shoutout to my friends who, again, let me send them so many ideas and snippets and drafts. Simply the best, as they say. 
> 
> (And as always I love hearing from you so drop a line if you'd like!) 
> 
> -xo-  
> clunion


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